


outstanding as the lesbian singer compared to those elsewhere

by starraya



Category: Holby City
Genre: 1930s AU, F/F, title from sappho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 09:48:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14210457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: Or Serena with silver hair, wearing a suit, singing French love songs, in a lesbian bar.-Rewritten, reposted, finished.





	outstanding as the lesbian singer compared to those elsewhere

_1932_

Bernie steps off the train with Serena’s last letter to her in her hand and all of Paris at her feet. Somewhere, within its busy streets, is Serena. She searches them for a week with no luck until a barman tells her that he had a Serena who sang in the evenings for board, one with brown eyes, short hair. He can’t remember her surname, but she left for work somewhere else. The pub is crowded, and the barman won’t tell her the name of the place. Only that no men go there.

It’s Bernie’s only lead, and she takes it.

Two days later she steps into a dimly-lit club full of cigarette smoke, a place where she heard the women cut their hair short, slick it back like men. They wear suits too, these women, like men. Bernie brushes her sticky hands against her dress. Pushes her way through the crowds to the bar. From her left she hears laughter, the clink of glasses and her eyes flit to a corner of the room that is lit by a hazy yellow glow. The light glints off a woman’s monocle, her cropped ginger hair. There’s a tie at her neck but the woman perched on her lap is like Serena, dark curls and arched eyebrows and scarlet lips. She whispers in her lover’s ear.

Bernie’s skin flushes. She fixes her attention on the bar and mumbles her way through an order of whiskey, and the bartender – also short-haired and suited – smiles at her. “Is this your first time here?”

Bernie nods. “I’m looking for a woman.”

The bartender shoots her an ‘aren’t we all?’ look.

“I’m looking for a Serena Campbell?”

Before the bartender can respond a hush sweeps through the room. Bernie’s eyes snap to the stage at the front. A piano note strikes. The stage lights up. Serena.

-

When victory was declared Bernie and Serena were helping a doctor to amputate a soldier’s legs. They hadn’t slept in 38 hours. They’d hardly eaten. Their uniforms were caked with blood. Serena could feel her body trembling, warning her to rest, as they scrubbed their hands with soap and peeled off their uniforms, exchanged old clothes for new. The idea that all this was over would sink in later, but for now they were too exhausted even for joy, too exhausted to say a word to each other until they were inside their tent.

Serena crawled into bed, and Bernie thought she’d fallen asleep until she heard Serena’s cries. “That poor man.”

They had treated hundreds like him, without limbs, without sight, and others, without any hope at all, and they never had the time before to indulge in the luxury of weeping.

Bernie perched on Serena’s bed, stroked a hand through Serena’s hair. “Let me lie next to you.”

“Someone might come in.”

“Everyone knows not to disturb to us.”

"The war is over." Bernie’s hand froze at the flat tone of Serena’s voice. Serena turned over so that she was on her back and looking up at Bernie. Her eyes glistened with tears, but they were somehow emptier than Bernie’s had ever seen them.

“It’s time to go home now,” Serena said.

“Home.” Bernie breathed the word as if she’d never heard it before, as if was in another language. She wasn’t sure where home was for her anymore. She left her family years ago to escape their talk of marriage and motherhood and their pressing it upon her like a cloth over her mouth.

“Home.”

Fear crept up Bernie’s spine. “We go home, and everything goes back to normal?”

"That's the theory, yes."

"What’s normal anymore?"

"You know what I mean, Bernie, I . . ."

“No. I don’t, Serena.” Bernie stood up. “Three and half years, and you’re ready to just wipe them away like chalk off a blackboard.”

“I have a husband.” Serena stood up on the opposite side of bed. “A man who risked his life, who got shot at, who got gassed, who got God knows what else done to him defending his country whilst we were . . . playing pretend –”

“Oh yes, I forgot about all our picnics at Hampton Court gardens, sipping wine and watching the sunset.”

They were words that Serena had often told her. Despite the long, arduous shifts, Bernie struggled to sleep, struggled to let go of the screams and sobs of the men so Serena sat next to her and told her stories of the pair of them, childish fantasies, but they soothed Bernie, let her drift off into darkness.

“Edward needs me to care of him.” Serena crossed her arms.

“He was never kind to you.”

“So what? He deserves what happened? He deserves to live alone with only nightmares for company?”

Serena sank down on the bed, her back to Bernie. “I made vows.”

They made vows, Bernie wantted to yell back. They made vows. Maybe not with words, but with a shared look across a patient bed, a brush of fingertips – the only contact they could risk during a busy shift and the one thing they drew the strength from to carry on – and then, in the sanctuary of their tent, they made other vows, with embraces, with kisses. Bernie uttered a thousand vows against Serena’s skin, but maybe Serena never listened.

-

Bernie watches Serena take the stage. Her hair is cropped and shorter than Bernie’s ever seen it. When they first meet it curled past Serena’s shoulders and for most of the time it was pinned beneath her white hat, but at night Serena would let Bernie gently untie her hair and brush it through. The movement calmed Bernie, helped her unwind. Bernie cut Serena’s hair short for her, above her chin but not her ears, when Serena decided that there were simply far more important matters to attend to in life than the tiresome process of putting one’s hair up and taking it down and putting it up again. Sliver streaked her hair, earlier than Serena expected - she blamed it on the war - but Bernie loved to watch them glint in the sunlight when they gardened together.

Serena’s wish when they looked for a place to live: “I don’t want a house full of rooms or a garage full of motor cars, but I do want a garden for the three of us.” In return, Bernie said she didn’t want a library – she found many a book dull and righteous and had, in her youth, defaced many of Freud’s work with ‘accidently spilled ink’ – but she wanted book shelves. One for medical journals, another for books yet to be discovered, yet to be brought, yet to be published, for the books that they brought on their outings together in London, for a colourful book of nursery rhymes. They brought every Virginia Woolf novel, and at night Bernie would lie in Serena’s lap, struggling to fall asleep or startled awake from a nightmare, and Serena would trace the shell of Bernie’s ear with her finger and read her Mrs Dalloway. She had read it to her three and a quarter times.

The story, however, and those sunlight days spent gardening and their gay outings in the bookshops of London, had simply stopped, as if someone had dropped the needle whilst sewing a tapestry and never found it again. Until now . . .

Bernie gazes at Serena as she sings, at her short silver hair and her tuxedo. She’s forgone the jacket, but her shirt is a crisp white, her bowtie a perfect shining black and her waistcoat buttoned, clinging to the unmistakable femininity of her curves. Her lips are painted a deep, glistening red. Bernie saw her wear similar shades when they went out for dinner at a restaurant where she couldn’t kiss Serena’s lipstick off her or a party at a friend’s home where she could. Serena liked to paint her face, sometimes, liked to indulge in rouge and kohl and powder after the austerity of the war. Bernie knew Serena liked having comforts she never had before, and Bernie would buy her scented soaps and face creams and French perfumes for birthday and Christmas presents.

Serena sings songs Bernie hasn’t heard before, but her French, thought it never reached Serena’s standard, remains good and she catches the words, figures out that they are love songs. At the end of the set of songs, there is no applause, just a hum of expectation in the air as every woman in the bar watches Serena glide off the stage. Bernie guesses she is heading towards the woman with the arched eyebrows and dark curls, the one perched on her lover’s lap – that would have been easier to bear – but Serena turns to someone sitting next to her. She’s young, in her twenties perhaps, blonde and beautiful, and she is mesmerised by Serena. Two roses bloom in the girl’s cheeks.

Serena leans down, kisses her on the lips for no more than a couple of seconds, but Bernie doesn’t watch Serena break away and return to the stage and disappear behind the curtain. Bernie runs outside the club and gasps for lungfuls of cold air.

The applause for Serena is loud.

-

Bernie returns to the bar the next night to watch Serena Wolfe perform. She can’t help it. She orders whiskey and settles herself within the darkness of a corner. She doesn’t talk to any of the other women, even though some eye her up, the strange English newcomer. She just sits, waits and watches Serena sing. She never catches Serena’s eyes, wonders if Serena ever sees her, she must, Bernie thinks after the fifth night, have caught a glimpse of her, must know she’s here, but if Serena does she never shows it.

-

Eight months after the war ended Serena opened the door to Bernie on the doorstep.

“I read it in the paper. I’m so sorry,” she said when Serena lead her into the study.

“He passed within a week. By the end, he was so feverish, so ill, I’m glad it wasn’t longer.”

“It must have been awful.”

“It was.” Serena sat down behind her desk. “Why are you here?”

“I read about Edward’s debts too.”

“Brilliant. Nothing is secret in this new world, is it?”

“I want to help.”

“Thank you,” Serena started to read a paper on her desk, “but I think I can manage on my own.”

Bernie twisted her hands together, waited, but Serena didn’t look up. Bernie felt tears prick at her eyes. For weeks, even before the news of Edward’s death, she’d built it up in her mind: what it would be like to see Serena again. She’d been realistic, imagined angry words borne of shock, imagined lengthy arguments, but not this, not Serena’s indifference, her dismissal.

“Alright,” Bernie says and turns on foot to the hallway.

“Bernie, wait.” Serena follows her. Bernie turns around to see that they are tears in Serena’s eyes. “I’m pregnant.” The confession tumbles from Serena’s lips. “And I don’t want it. I wanted to get rid of it. I couldn’t being my self too. But I don’t want to bring a child up in this world. Peace might last for another five, ten years, but it won’t last forever. And the debts –”

“Serena, slow down.”

Bernie reaches for Serena’s hands to clasp, but, before she can, Serena throws her arms around her.

-

On the fifth night, Serena finishes her last song, steps off the stage and towards Bernie. Her suit is, like every other night, immaculate, her hair is carefully styled, but her make-up is heavier: her mascara thick, her cheeks glowing when they catch the light, her lipstick so deeply red it looks plum. Her face is unreadable, and Bernie could be any stranger, any woman in the bar Serena decided to pick out at a random. Her perfume is overwhelming as she leans in to Bernie, her lips ghosting her lips. She presses a kiss to Bernie’s cheek, lingers too long. Just as she pulls back, Bernie turns and captures her lips. She expects Serena to tear away, but Serena surprises her by deepening the kiss. It is only after they part that Bernie sees Serena eyes flash with anger and realises that continuing the kiss was only an act of regaining control on Serena’s behalf. Without glancing back, Serena makes for the stage and disappears behind the curtains. 

When the women in the bar resume their talking Bernie registers how quiet it was, how for a moment she believed it was only her and Serena back in England, kissing under a clear summer night in their garden, and if Bernie had reached out she would have felt the firm curve of Serena’s stomach, a kick underneath it.

-

Serena is in her room behind the stage, sat in front of a mirror and a basin of water, when Bernie enters.

"What the hell are you doing?" Serena jumps to her feet, pulling her dressing gown tighter around her.

“I wanted to talk to you," Bernie says.

“And you didn’t think to knock?”

“A year and a half and you didn’t think to write? I let you leave, because I loved you, because I knew you needed something I couldn’t give you, you needed to go somewhere new, somewhere without ghosts –”

“Get out.” Serena shoots her a piercing look.

“What?”

“Get out. This is my place of work. You can’t just waltz in and start –”

“You can’t just kiss me without saying a word.”

“I was performing. It’s my job.” The cruelty of her words stuns Bernie. Serena fingers tremble as she twists her necklace and she takes a breath. “You need to go.”

Bernie nods, but before she opens the door, her voice turns empty, as if drained by the exhaustion of the past two years. “21st of January 1920. You woke up just after midnight, and we both thought it would be hours, but she wouldn’t wait. Half an hour later, and I held her as she took her first breath and I put her in your arms. You were both so beautiful. You fell asleep at four because you were exhausted, but she was wide awake and so I took her out our room to give you some quiet and I told her how brilliant you were, how I’d do everything I could to look after you both. I was there when she learnt to crawl, to walk, to talk. I loved her.” Tears course down Bernie’s cheeks. “She was my daughter too, Serena.”

After Bernie leaves, Serena stands, frozen. She remembers the streets of London, letting her eye off Elinor for a moment, only a moment, she remembers her scream, the screech of motor tyres, she remembers running, falling to her knees – she scarped her ankle on the road, but the sting never registered in her mind after when  Bernie pulled the bits of grit out with tweezers. Bernie was struggling not to cry, Serena had no tears left. She sat there, blank-faced, barely there – a ghost, hanging by a gossamer thread between this world and whatever world came next, a world of blackness, a world of nothingness.

After the funeral, it began: Serena wandering the streets in the dead of night, catching trains in the middle of the day and ending up in strange towns, not returning once, for three days, Bernie following her, having to follow her, driven by worry, driven by the fear one day she would be found lying in an alley, or would go to the station without the intent to catch a train. Serena would shout at her, scream at her for following her, but Bernie would not stop, until Serena admitted that she could not bear to stay in the house anymore with Elinor's room, the shelf of children's books, all those reminders . . .

Bernie had known she was one and had let Serena leave, put Serena’s needs before her owns. All those months, Serena had curled in on herself and never once reached out to Bernie.

Serena runs after her, out onto the moon-lit street.

"Don't go." She calls out Bernie's name, and Bernie turns around. "Please," Serena says, "don't go." She reaches for Bernie's hand. "I rent an apartment. It's five minutes away. Let me change, and I'll take you there. I wrote letters, to you, to Elinor, even a few to my mother. I should have sent you yours, I know." Bernie doesn't take her hand away from Serena's and Serena dares to hope she hasn't lost the last person alive on this earth she loves. "Come back to mine?"

Bernie responds by circling her arms around Serena's waist and pulling her close.

**Author's Note:**

> So, lesbian bars in the 1920s and (early) 1930s flourished in Berlin and Paris. The one that Serena performs in is based on Le Monocle, a bar where women wore monocles to signify their lesbianism. There are some photos online and they're really cool.


End file.
